Design & Development Digest : test1

Visa Enhances Authorize.net Developer Center

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:17:00 GMT

Visa has enhanced the Authorize.net Developer Center in an effort to faciliate the creation of electronic payments applications among independent developers. If you've had trouble deciding which API to use, ever wanted to download code and test your connection, or even sought out some SDK's and sample applications, then today is your day.

Several enhancements have ben made, including:

- Streamlining the test account creation process, the 15-minute test workflow and sample applications.

- Developed API overviews and visual explanation to aid in API selection

- Providing open source SDKs in several popular languages

- Added a new integration method (Direct Post Method) to helps simplify PCI DSS compliance requirements

"Visa has developed many innovative network-based payment products and services. But when you combine the power of our network, the resources of the Developer Center and the creativity of software developers, there's no limit to the innovations that can emerge," said Jim McCarthy, Global Head of Product for Visa. "Good ideas come from a variety of sources. We believe that opening our network to the developer community is critical to fueling innovation and driving one of Visa's central goals, extending the benefits of digital payments to anyone, anywhere, using any device."

WordPress vs. Drupal: Web Pro's Follow the Money

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:11:00 GMT

Freelance job search engine DoNanza released its quarterly State of the Work-From-Home and Freelancing Economy report which reveals how the rival CMS/Blogging platforms fared in the third quarter of 2010, most notably WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

According to DoNanza, demand for professional CMS projects is showing significant growth with an average growth of 49 percent quarter over quarter. In Q3 2010, Wordpress projects at grew by 61 percent with Joomla growing at 38 percent and Drupal at 26 percent. As you can see, WordPress is the clear leader in terms of the number of projects (with more than 6 times the amount of projects in comparison to Drupal) but that is far from the most interesting insight to be gained from the report.

Most fascinating is that Drupal professionals earn the most. According to Donanza, when looking at the average project budget, opportunities for Drupal consistently came in with an average project budget of $915 (twice as much as the average WordPress project with $455 and Joomla Project with a $473 budget).

"Our DoNanza Universe data verifies the belief that most people start out with WordPress on their own" said Liran Kotzer, CEO of DoNanza. "Only 18 percent of total WordPress projects are site building, while 31 percent of Drupal projects are site building. It means that with Drupal people are seeking at-home-work freelance support from the get-go and not trying to build the initial site by themselves, as with WordPress."

So as a developer and designer, which CMS should you choose?

"More businesses and individuals will keep using CMS platforms as a way to express themselves and do business" said Kotzer. "Currently each of the platforms has its own relative advantages, and we are curious to see how the differences between them will play out in the future. In the meantime, all of us benefit from the competition by getting much more flexible infrastructures with advanced features."

Amazon Launching Free Usage Tier

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 14:34:00 GMT

Let's see other cloud-based providers match this - Amazon Web Services is offering developers a free usage tier for a full year. Beginning November 1st 2010, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 instance for an entire year, and a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.

If you have yet to explore AWS and are interested in launching some new applications and broadening your knowledge - without incurring any charges (as if they were exorbitant anyway) - then you should definitely check this out. I've been using AWS for quite some time and it's become a core part of my personal Web development strategy.

The free offer from AWS includes 750 hours per month of micro Linux Amazon EC2 instance usage, 750 hours per month of an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, 10 GB per month of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, 5 GB per month of Amazon S3 Storage, 30 GB per month of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services), 25 Machine Hours per month of Amazon SimpleDB, 100,000 Requests per month of Amazon Simple Queue Service.

“We’re excited to introduce a free usage tier for new AWS customers to help them get started on AWS,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “Everyone from entrepreneurial college students to developers at Fortune 500 companies can now launch new applications at zero expense and with the peace of mind that they can instantly scale to accommodate growth. We can’t wait to see what great ideas are set in motion now that it’s free to experiment and launch production applications in the AWS cloud.”

Malware Delivery Techniques Focus on HTML Attachments

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 14:24:00 GMT

Use of malicious HTML email attachments increased significantly in the third quarter according to Internet security technology vendor CommTouch. In its Q3 2010 Internet Threats Trend Report (PDF), CommTouch examined the methodology within blended attacks, such as the “Here You Have” worm, which spread widely in September using Outlook contact lists from infected PCs. Both “Here You Have” and numerous fake LinkedIn invitations relied on a combination of social engineering and masked hyperlinks to lead users to websites with malware scripts.

“The increased use of HTML attachments shows how prominent the multi-stage attack vector has become,” said Asaf Greiner, Commtouch vice president, products. “The blended nature of malicious activity further highlights the need for an integrated security offering that can block spam and malware emails, prevent users from visiting malicious Web sites and delete malware files and scripts.”

Other highlights from the Q3 Trend Report include:

Spam levels averaged 88% of all email traffic throughout the quarter, peaking at over 95% in mid-September with 198 billion spam/phishing messages per day. By comparison, Q2 spam levels averaged 80% of all email, with 179 billion spam/phishing messages per day.
Approximately 339,000 zombies were activated daily, almost 30,000 more per day than in the previous quarter.
The most popular spam topic this quarter was pharmacy (59% of all spam).
For the third quarter running, pornography/sexually explicit material is the website category most likely to include malware.
India keeps its title for the second quarter in a row as the country with the most zombies – 14% of all zombies worldwide.
Streaming media/downloads continues to be the most popular topic for blog creators in the Web 2.0 sphere of user-generated content.